You are making a whole lot of unfounded assumptions. Who says those that escape knew the fate of those that didn't? Who says they have a choice as to where to go? Perhaps they need to be in that area at that time because that is where their food is at that time. The options you present are not even remotely close to exhaustive, yet you hide behind their totality for your excuse to avoid considering the issue at all.

Dolphins are among the freest creatures in the ocean, traveling vast distances in little time and pretty much independent. And I'm sure something drives them to be in that bay at that time; its just not a higher intelligence, by all the evidence. Thus the tendency to reinforce: dolphins are dumb animals.

So this argument isn't 'considering the issue at all'? Then what's it about? Some other issue? Would a personal attack have been more on-point? (sarcasm)

Your reply did not add anything to what you originally said. You are making the assumption that dolphins are stupid because humans manage to kill them. And then you are using that faulty assumption as a reason to excuse yourself from considering the issue.

One more try: dolphins may not be very intelligent because they cannot or won't communicate between themselves. Or their ethics are unfathomable to us because they don't seem to value dolphin life as humans do human life.

Got it? That's the entirety of the argument. If you'd like to address that argument, great. If you just want to agitate for dolphin right by shouting down argument, then fell free, I'm done.

I got your argument. And addressed it. In the first post. You have made two additional posts which have added absolutely no information to the first, and have not addressed the flaws of your argument. Again, there are many other explanations for what you observe besides "dolphins are dumb" and "dolphins don't care about each other". Given that we have evidence of dolphins being smart, and them caring about each other (and humans even), your assumptions are not likely to be correct.

Ah! A post actually related to the argument! SO now we can have a discussion.

Dolphins are of course very 'dumb'; its taken years of hard research to come up with any evidence of intelligence, and its all indirect. Why we even bothered? Probably because of their large-ish brain, which turns out is an elaborate visual cortex (ok, sonar cortex, same thing).

They play; they have family units, at least for a while. Is this intelligence? Crows do all that too; many other mammals also.

Caring for humans is anecdotal. My favorite one is, people adrift from shipwreck get pushed to shore by dolphins. This suffers from observer bias - dolphins love to play with floaty things, and push them around. All the sailors pushed out to sea don't tell their storey.

May dolphins be intelligent? Ok, sure. But as they don't have societies, inventions, any more language than many birds, their intelligence is very much more similar to other 'lower' animals than human.

Maybe its a different kind of intelligence? That's reaching, kind of making up things to fit a desired conclusion, but ok. Then the 3rd argument in my original post: its a kind of intelligence that doesn't extend to saving one anothers' lives. If even one escaped dolphin mentioned "I got out of there; all my family are missing, plus two other pods I know of; maybe we should stay away from that bay", we would have fabulous evidence of an intelligent society sharing the planet with us. Observably not happening, so one could conclude (I never said I conclude this, thats your projection) that they are of an intelligence too small to permit that communication. In fact, occams razor damands this conclusion.

Adding "yeah but I don't believe science" to your non-argument doesn't improve it. You are still making the same baseless assumptions, just with the addition of suggesting that you alone possess the knowledge required to determine the intelligence of dolphins, and all those people who spent their lives studying them are dumbasses.